The mayors, take 4

The last four chief executives of New York City have all brought distinctive styles to the office and presided over different mayoralties. Very different. But there's one thing they have in common: They all loved (or love) the job.

Photo: Louisa Bertman
The last four chief executives of New York City have all brought distinctive styles to the office and presided over different mayoralties.

Opinionated, garrulous and personable, Ed Koch grabbed Gotham's reins in 1978, when public morale had been beaten down by fiscal woes and crime, and gave New Yorkers a mayor who was one of them. Still out and about, the 85-year-old is often greeted by well-wishers with a variation on his signature line. “How'm I doin', Mayor?” they ask. The three-termer, who has an office at law firm Bryan Cave, recalls a city “on the edge of bankruptcy”—rolling $6 billion in short-term debt from one budget to the next. The state government, a voice of fiscal sanity at the time, gave the city four years to balance its books. Mr. Koch did it in three. One visible Koch reform—having two rather than three sanitation workers per truck—is saving money to this day.Housing, though, was his programmatic pinnacle. The 1970s economic slump led to an avalanche of apartments seized for unpaid taxes, and the Reagan administration cut off funding to fix city buildings. Mr. Koch stepped in with a $5.1 billion initiative to build or rehabilitate 250,000 units for low- and middle-income tenants. “The program was spectacular,” he says. “There was no corruption in that program.”But corruption would mar his final term. A scandal at the city's Parking Violations Bureau erupted, with fellow Democrats Donald Manes, the Queens borough president, and Stanley Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader, at the center. Mr. Friedman was convicted. Mr. Manes committed suicide. “They were not part of my administration,” Mr. Koch notes. Nonetheless, the episode led to his defeat in the 1989 Democratic primary by David Dinkins, then the Manhattan borough president.
IN HIS WORDS: ED KOCH

APPROACH TO GOVERNING: “My management style,” Mr. Koch says, “was to give every commissioner full authority and discretion to move departments ahead. I said: ‘I want you to be innovative, even if it means occasionally you fail. And if you fail, I will stand with you.' It generally turned out OK.”

ROOKIE JITTERS: “When I became mayor, I said to myself, ‘Dear God, how am I going to do this?' I decided: Give it your best, and that's it. Sleep nights. ‘Be not afraid.' It's a Catholic hymn; I'm Jewish, but I like it.”

TOUGHEST MOMENTS: He attended the funerals of 39 police officers and was often too emotional to console their widows. “I would break down,” he recalls, “and they would comfort me.”

Mr. Koch disputes that his experience proves third terms are destined to disappoint. His housing initiative, a restaurant smoking ban and public financing of political campaigns were all accomplished in his final term.Longtime City Hall watcher Dennis Smith, an associate professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, says Mr. Koch was “very analytically oriented” but sometimes misguided. The mayor focused on maximizing the number of police on patrol and quickening their response, for instance. Bad call, the professor says: “Studies had shown average response time and visible patrols didn't make a difference. It didn't reduce crime, and it didn't even produce feelings of safety.”But on balance, Mr. Koch gets high marks. “He was facing a very disarrayed government and pressing social problems,” says Sharyn O'Halloran, professor of political economy at Columbia University. “Just to make the city function was a triumph.”

David Dinkins

David Dinkins is 82, more than 16 years removed from Gracie Mansion, and still fighting to define his legacy. A sign of progress: With increasing frequency, experts trace the start of the turnaround in the city's war on crime to the second half of his lone term, in 1992 and '93, when crime rates dipped and the city ratcheted up its police force with funding the mayor wrenched from the state.Mr. Dinkins laments, “From the clips, the impression given is that on Dec. 31, 1989, there was no crime at all, and on the next day, my first day in office, there was a homicide rate of 2,000.”NYU's Mr. Smith agrees: “[Police] started doing the right things under Dinkins. Given the fact that crime had been going up year after year, it should have been a bigger story when crime started coming down.”But sometimes ideology trumped analysis. Mr. Smith says the administration poured resources into family intervention to keep children out of foster care without data to show it would work. The mayor's staff didn't believe that people would become homeless to qualify for better, city-funded housing; his homeless services coordinator later admitted that service-induced demand was real, according to Mr. Smith.Because he left office before crime fell dramatically, Mr. Dinkins fears his mayoralty will always be characterized by the racial violence that overtook a mixed Brooklyn neighborhood in 1991. He forecasts his obituary: “It will say, ‘David N. Dinkins. Born July 10, 1927. First black mayor of the City of New York.' And almost the next paragraph will be about Crown Heights.”On Aug. 19, 1991, a black child, Gavin Cato, was struck by the motorcade of a Jewish leader. Rumors spread that medics had assisted injured Jews and left the boy to die. Blacks rioted and a rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was fatally stabbed. “It was a tragedy and never should have happened,” says the former mayor, adding with dismay that Gavin Cato's death often goes unmentioned.
IN HIS WORDS: DAVID DINKINS

WHAT HE MISSES: “Outside the country, the mayor of the City of New York is treated like a head of state.”

WHAT HE DOESN'T: “When the phone rings at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, you know it's something bad.”

FAVORITE MAYORS: “I was always very fond of John Lindsay. I thought he got a bum rap. I liked Abe Beame. And I like Mike Bloomberg. I wish he'd gotten his third term in a different way.”

ADVICE FOR SUCCESSORS: “You are the steward [of the city]. You hold it in trust for those who come after you.”

Police struggled for three days to restore order. “I was accused of holding back the police and letting the blacks attack the Jews,” Mr. Dinkins says. “That wasn't what happened. I told them, ‘Whatever you're doing is not working.' They altered their behavior and brought the rioting to a halt.”The mayor regrets not delivering that message sooner. But accusations that he sat idle when in fact he was “ducking bricks and bottles, trying to bring an end to it” are still painful, he says.Black boycotts of three Korean grocers exacerbated racial tensions. Mr. Dinkins' aides settled two of them, but one in Brooklyn persisted for months until the mayor got involved. “One day I walked through the picket line, made a few purchases, and that was the end of it,” he recalls.Those incidents tend to overshadow Mr. Dinkins' accomplishments. He implemented six-day library service for the first time in a quarter-century. He created an all-civilian board to review police misconduct. He hired a special commissioner to probe wrongdoing in schools. He kept “beacon schools” open after hours as community centers. He extended city benefits to same-sex partners. He created new rules in the bidding process that quintupled the percentage of city contracts awarded to minority- or women-owned businesses.“We got a lot done,” says Mr. Dinkins, who has been at Columbia University since he left office and is a professor in the practice of public affairs. “But I dare say you're not going to hear too much of that.”

Rudy Giuliani

The way Rudy Giuliani sees it, he ran New York City like a business, finding inefficiencies and ironing them out. Or maybe he just took an iron and gave Gotham a much-needed whack in the head.Whatever the case, New York was not the same city after Mr. Giuliani, 66, got done with it. “I took over a city that was dispirited,” he says, “where 65% of the people wanted to live somewhere else, and handed over a city that was totally reversed.”Although his approval ratings soared after the Sept. 11 attacks, public opinion of Mr. Giuliani was polarized during much of his eight-year tenure. But the quality of life was transformed by a stunning drop in crime. Many cities became safer in the 1990s; New York's turnaround was breathtaking. “There were 1,900 murders in the last year of David Dinkins, and when I left, there were 650,” Mr. Giuliani says. Violent offenses dropped to 58,000 from 153,000. “That's a different city than the one I inherited.”
IN HIS WORDS: RUDY GIULIANI

REGRETS: Not being able to apply CompStat to the school system, which was not then under mayoral control. “It would have worked brilliantly with the schools, but the Board of Education would not accept it,” Mr. Giuliani says. “They voted down any statistical measure of performance.” He also laments failing to privatize public hospitals.

NO CREDIT: Mr. Giuliani rejects claims that the turnaround in crime can be traced to the Dinkins administration. “It wasn't Safe Streets, Safe City. It was CompStat; it was broken-windows policing; it was acquiring the transit police and the housing police. I added 7,000 cops beyond what they'd done.”

LOOKING BACK: “The thing I miss most were the crises, because I think I came to know how to handle them. Like a baseball player, you want to come to bat with the tying run on base. I thought it got the best out of me.”

The former mayor, who now runs a consulting business, credits CompStat, through which police make heavy use of data trends, and “broken windows” policing, or paying attention to small infractions. Police began to focus on preventing crime, rather than responding to it.Columbia's Ms. O'Halloran says Mr. Giuliani ran the city like a military establishment. “He was commander in chief,” she says. “Like him or hate him, he really paid attention to the quality of life.”Adds Mr. Smith of NYU: “What Giuliani brought to the management of city government was force—force of character, force of personality. On the things he decided he was going to change, there was movement.”What came to epitomize that was a crackdown on squeegee men—about 200 hustlers who intimidated motorists stuck at red lights into paying for windshield cleaning. “It's taken on almost legendary significance now,” Mr. Giuliani says. “People all over the world know about the squeegee men.”He recalls telling Police Department lawyers who said no laws were being broken: “What about jaywalking? We're going to give them so many tickets, eventually they'll get tired.” Repeated sweeps wiped out the problem, built cops' morale and brought a sense of order.Federally imposed workfare rules led Mr. Giuliani to assign welfare recipients to community service, which caused many to leave the public dole in order to keep their off-the-books jobs. The number of welfare recipients in the city fell to 600,000 from 1.1 million. “We changed the whole nature of the agency from a welfare office to what I consider an employment agency,” he says.Mr. Giuliani's methods and undiplomatic style were a shock to the system. “I used to go to poor communities and get booed,” he recalls. “I'd say: ‘I'd rather give you the work ethic than a welfare check. Someday, you're going to really love me for this.' I was described as arrogant.”He calls New Yorkers who rejected his approach “intellectually arrogant” people who “think of fiscal conservatives as Neanderthals.”“I thought I was teaching the city a different direction,” he says. “I was coming into 20 or 30 years of a social democracy and was trying to make it a more entrepreneurial operation.”

Michael Bloomberg

IN HIS WORDS: MICHAEL BLOOMBERG

Mr. Bloomberg, who did not sit for an interview with Crain's, has offered these snippets over the years on governing.

NO FREE LUNCH: “Taxes are not good things, but if you want services, somebody's got to pay for them.”

PANNING PANDERERS: “If you look at people, whether in business or government, who haven't had any moral compass, who've just changed to say whatever they thought the popular thing was, in the end they're losers.”

JOB SATISFACTION: “I've got the greatest job in the world. There's no other job in government where cause and effect are so tightly coupled, where you can make a difference every day in so many different ways.”

"In God we trust,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg is fond of saying. “Everyone else, bring data.”No mayor has brought the data like Mr. Bloomberg, who made his billions selling financial data to Wall Street traders. Not only did he revamp and expand the annual accumulation of statistics known as the Mayor's Management Report, but he launched Citywide Performance Reporting, or CPR, giving clearer and more frequent snapshots of every nook and cranny of his administration.“Bloomberg runs New York Inc.,” says Ms. O'Halloran. “You can argue over whether you like the policies, but he's been effective.”When numbers and politics clash, Mr. Bloomberg has run into difficulty. He tried to sell congestion pricing for those driving into Manhattan but was blocked by the state Legislature. His push for a West Side football stadium was stopped at the goal line, and his bid for the 2012 Olympics missed the medal stand.He is universally praised, though, for wresting control of public schools from the dysfunctional Board of Education, bringing accountability to the system for the first time. While some parents have objected to his policies, and educators complain about filling in boxes for his ever-expanding data collection, Mr. Bloomberg points to rising scores and falling dropout rates.Advisers sometimes warn that a mayoral proposal will ding his popularity, but “he says that it's not a factor,” insists top Bloomberg aide Francis Barry. “He's made a career of proving the conventional wisdom wrong.”Mr. Smith says no mayor has emphasized evidence-based management like Mr. Bloomberg, and his hiring has been more merit-based and less political. “They have an incentive to have nobody in a critical position who isn't a high performer, because they are sharing in the accountability,” he says. “That's a wonderful change.”The mayor remade City Hall in the image of Bloomberg LP, his media company. Borrowing the trading-floor concept from his days on the Street, he moved managers out of their offices and into an open area called the bullpen. “It breeds an openness and informality that's very productive,” Mr. Barry says. “You don't have to make an appointment—you just walk up to someone. That goes from the mayor on down.” Mr. Bloomberg, 68, has pushed the envelope—rezoning neighborhoods to create housing near mass transit, launching 311, increasing standardized testing and opening charter schools, for example—and drives his commissioners to do the same.Transportation chief Janette Sadik-Khan built bike lanes and pedestrian plazas. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein reorganized his bureaucracy and will have 125 charter schools operating this fall. Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs has pushed to consolidate senior centers.Mr. Bloomberg's legacy will include the city's first Office of Sustainability, the redevelopment of Coney Island and Willets Point and the first subway extension in decades. His smoking ban in bars, controversial when it passed in 2002, is taken for granted now. He has forbidden trans fats in restaurants and required chain eateries to post calorie information. Some bemoan his “nanny state,” but Mr. Bloomberg points to data showing that diabetes prevalence in the city doubled in the past decade. Again, the data. Always, the data.Correction: Donald Manes was Queens borough president. His borough was misstated in an earlier version of this story, originally published June 27, 2010.